I.
The precarious relationship between (two-dimensional) painting and
(three-dimensional) reality has been considered a contradiction in
terms since no later than the end of the 1950s. In reference to the
friction between Art Informel (the European counterpart to Abstract
Expressionism in North America) and Pop art, Laszlo Glozer summed up
the problem in 1981 in his Westkunst catalogue with the words: ‘Exit
from the picture, return of the outside world’. As the Dadaists had to
some extent already attempted to do, artists at this time were
vehemently challenging the dichotomy between the concepts of
‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ in particular, but also of pictures and
objects.

II.
It is thus no accident that Stefanie von Schroeter references Art
Informel in her works and frequently juxtaposes it with stylistic
elements from comics and Pop art. Imbuing her pictorial works with
reality in this way is a primary concern of the Berlin-based artist. Yet
the combination of these two aesthetic styles, which once seemed
irreconcilable, is just the first step in the artist’s process to achieve
this end; the second entails the integration of three-dimensional
compositions in her ‘paintings’. As such, von Schroeter does not
withdraw from the pictorial medium but goes instead in the opposite
direction, attempting as it were to retreat into the picture.

III.
Before continuing, however, we should first take a closer look at the
artist’s paintings which, as mentioned above, use the abstract
vocabulary of Art Informel, with paint applied in ‘rapid and emotional
gestures’ with the aim of ‘expanding the spectrum of abstraction’, as
Martin Hentschel aptly describes it. This expansion allows her to
approach figuration in her works, drawing among others on the world
of comics as previously noted, yet it remains an approach and is never
fully realised, (still) persisting in maintaining a well-calculated
distance.

IV.
This distance is later completely abandoned by von Schroeter in her
‘bone works’ which she began around 2010. For these works, she
selected animal bones, which she then boiled, cleaned and painted. As
the long shapes of the bones invoke the painterly gestures of her
canvasses and are further removed from their original context through
the application of colour, they become pictorial in a certain respect:
the ‘bone works’ are thus a deliberately choreographed interplay
between two- and three-dimensionality. This interplay also takes up
elements of von Schroeter’s paintings, as the artist, with her abstract
Pop style of applying paint, again creates ‘a web that simultaneously
covers the plane as well as the spatial depth of the picture’ (Martin
Hentschel).
These painted bones are also highly charged in terms of content,
conjuring up the image of skeletons, i.e., all that remains of life after
death. For this reason, bones often appear in vanitas paintings,
especially in the form of skulls of course, representing the ‘ruins’ of
the body.

V.
Other works created by Stefanie von Schroeter comprise banal objects
from everyday life such as sieves, clothes, shoes, plastic chairs, laundry
baskets and umbrellas, which the artist paints and then partly destroys,
for example, by kicking, hammering or burning them. Thanks to the
artful application of paint, the external world of objects is brought a
step closer to the pictorial medium in these works. The partial
destruction of the objects—an artistic strategy that was introduced by
Gustav Metzger with his ‘self-destroying art’ in the 1960s—makes their
materiality seem fragile, ‘mortal’, transforming them into trashy Pop
art motifs that could at the same time belong to the terse, bleak
imagery of a vanitas painting, thus spanning the poles of low and high
culture.

VI.
In her most recent works, the artist forces her exit into the picture,
this time by bringing together her two-dimensional painting and her
three-dimensional objects. Standard plastic sieves are affixed to the
canvas, and paint is applied to both in von Schroeter’s typical style. In
a final step, the three-dimensional ‘painting’ has been burned in
places, scorching and creating holes in both the canvas and the sieves.
The sieves are thus an integral part of the work and are not treated
differently in any way from the more classic painting surface of canvas.
Her approach to the supposedly dual systems of flat planes and bodies,
of art and everyday life, of application and destruction is
undiscriminating and free of hierarchies, and it is precisely through this
approach that she achieves her objective of instilling her works with a
sense of reality. The contradistinction between picture and external
world seems to have been lifted momentarily in Stefanie von
Schroeter’s art.